Many good men and women have gone to prison for the sake of the Gospel. They’ve been captured and persecuted for spreading it, honoring it, and defending it. Some wrote from those prisons like Paul or John Bunyan. Some strengthened the faith of those around them, the way we saw Lady Jane Grey do last week while she awaited her execution from isolated detention.

But imagine– instead of a jail cell with a cot, a chamber pot, and a desk with some paper– you were chained to a bench. And your hands constantly hovered before a massive oar on board a galley ship. Imagine instead of being a prisoner, you were a slave, forced to row military ships when the wind was not in favor of the sails. This is how John Knox lived for nineteen months in the late 1540s, after he was captured by the French when they took back Scotland’s St. Andrews Castle. The fortress that had become a safe haven for Protestants during the tumultuous period where Scotland hung in the balance between the Reformation that King Henry VIII had inadvertently given rise to, and the Roman Catholic church that constantly sought to regain a foothold there.

Imagine being told one day to attend a meeting at a secret location. You travel to the house where you were told to meet and all the major politicians of your time are there. They are kneeling, promising you fealty, and calling you the new ruler of England.

On July 9th, 1553, Lady Jane Grey found that her cousin, King Edward VI had died and that in his last will and testament, he had ordered the succession of the crown be changed– passing over Edward’s older half-sister Mary Tudor to name Lady Jane Grey as his heir to the throne. This was a role she neither anticipated nor campaigned for. In fact, she first protested the crown and when she did finally accept the role, she asked God to help her rule to His glory if it be His will that she reign.

Imagine: you’ve made a choice that will change the course of your life forever. What lies behind is a life you can’t go back to or be content in, so you have chosen to leave it. If caught, you would be severely punished, and yet the future you venture towards is vastly uncertain and unknown.

In many ways, this analogy applies to the Christian walk: being saved by grace and living righteously will require us to step on to a different path. Becoming sanctified by the Lord will mean leaving our old lifestyles, haunts, and routines in order to make new ones that glorify God. In doing so, we may find that those we once called friends no longer understand us and shun us. We may find things that once gave us comfort, don’t anymore.

We’ve all done it– we’ve all looked at the sin of someone else and judged it to be greater than our own. Maybe, in our own pride, we’ve even wished that God would pour out justice on that sin.

In John 8, we see a woman who is brought before Jesus to judge for her sin. John writes that she was brought to the temple and presented to Jesus as an adulteress and was caught in the very act– the punishment for which was to be stoned to death. The aim for these religious leaders was to put Jesus in a catch-22: condemn the woman for her sin thus painting Jesus as a strict, cruel judge, or for Jesus to condone the adultery which would make him wantonly lax on unrighteous, immoral sin.

This past weekend, Sam and I went on a date. The plan was to do a workshop at a glass blowing studio, have dinner, and maybe drive around together. Saturday morning, Sam said, “There’s a rally happening tonight in Charlie Kirk’s name. Would you go pass out gospel tracts with me?”

At first I was hesitant. This did not fit in with my plans to spend time together; it didn’t sound like the ideal date night I had been looking forward to. Then I caught myself thinking: isn’t this the kind of man I prayed for? The kind of man who went out of his way to share Jesus with others? These were the days I dreamed to have with my husband: to do ministry side by side and to serve God together.

In 2015, I was living in Cape Town, South Africa, a city that doesn’t have a skyline the way normal cities do. Instead, this city is marked by the three mountains that loom large over the metropolis. The biggest of these mountains is called Table Mountain, named for its long, flat shape.

I’m not a hiker by any means, but climbing to the top of Table Mountain is a rite of passage of sorts, especially for foreign students like I was. While my family was in town, we decided to tackle the trail together. It was continuous stairs and switchbacks from the trailhead to the top, and it always seemed that just when you thought you were going to see the top, the trail just kept going.

Back in the early 2000s, our scope of who could be accessed for Biblical teaching was limited. You had your pastor at your local church, maybe a few tele-evangelists, and whatever books you could get your hands on if you had a Christian bookstore around. It was probably more simple to sift through sources and try other teachers if the Gospel wasn’t being preached.

Compare that to now, and the information, teachers, and material at our fingertips is so endless, you could never possibly get through it all. With the internet, you can access this past Sunday’s sermon from any given church that has a video camera, a microphone, and a YouTube channel– and that includes megachurches right on down to the tiny, country church in America’s smallest town.

Have you ever wondered how Jesus went from feeding the five thousand, to only have a handful of people at the foot of the cross when He died?

The truth is, Jesus had His twelve disciples that He hand-picked and called to ministry with Him, but there were other disciples that also travelled with Jesus to the different places that He went to in the three years He taught, ministered, and served. Not everyone went everywhere the way the twelve did, but Jesus had a way of attracting followers just by nature of what He was doing.

How many things did you try to build your life on before Jesus? How many things did you try to nourish your soul with before His grace? What did you try to satisfy your heart with before you believed?

Before Christ, you can build your life on a number of things: a career, a family, an academic resumè, entertainment, the news– you name it, someone has probably tried it. But whatever that thing might be is like a sandcastle… it crumbles and amounts to nothing.

Tonight, I walked into the kitchen and into a swarm of fruit flies. There are not a lot of household pests that get under my skin the way fruit flies do. I see them and I feel like I’m breathing them in, they’re crawling on my skin; I get itchy just thinking about it.

The best trap for fruit flies is putting some dish soap in the bottom of a container, then a little apple cider vinegar and water before shaking it up. The trap is even better when you put a piece of plastic wrap over top and poke some holes in it, this way, when the flies crawl in to the trap, they can’t easily get back out.

I made four loaves of bread this weekend– unleavened bread to be exact. Sam has always wanted to use real bread in Sunday communion and so I offered to give it my best shot.

I researched recipes until I found something that seemed as intentional as possible. I made test loaves, one with regular, all-purpose flour and another with whole wheat flour. I decided to halve the recipe to make a thinner loaf, to use a cast iron skillet to try and char it a little, and sprinkled a little salt over top of the finished product, just to add a little bit of taste.

Quick: Name a hymn!

What did you say?

I cannot hear “How Great Thou Art” without being a kid again, sitting in the seats of my childhood church. I can see the exact shade of the carpet. I can feel the slightly scratchy cushion of the seatback behind me. I can hear the very off-key singing of Ella, the older lady who sat next to my family.

Almost a couple years ago, Sam and I went to Arizona for him to interview for an opportunity to work with a church planting organization. We went into the long weekend with high hopes and were praying that God would provide– Sam was looking for a job at the time.

Long story short, they didn’t offer Sam the opportunity, but they wanted us to see their “innovative” way of doing church so that we could experience God in the way their quickly growing congregation was. We went in, sat down, and worshiped through a carefully curated worship, a neatly-packaged sermon with four, easy bulletpoints, in an auditorium of people that were in and out within an hour and twenty minutes.

We all have those life-moments where we’re trying to make something work that just won’t work. Maybe you’ve been busting your butt at work, trying to get a promotion that keeps passing you over. Maybe you’re trying to connect with a family member that just seems to like to push your buttons and it seems like you’ll never have that harmony you crave with them. Maybe you’re trying to conceive a child, but no matter how diligently you track your body or how many diets you try or how many doctors you see, that little plus sign keeps evading you.

Sam and I knew we were going to be married pretty much before we started dating. Somehow, I just knew in my heart from very early on that I was going to be doing this dating thing for the last time with him. We were friends with the intention of dating for a whole summer before we agreed it was time to be boyfriend and girlfriend; by the fall, I knew more about him than anyone else and was sure that I loved him.

By December, we decided to approach my parents about the fact that we were sure about each other and that while it wouldn’t be tomorrow, this was it. I think that freaked my parents out. Sam just started a new job in construction. I just got my license to sell insurance. We were two twenty-somethings still living with parents and didn’t know how we were going to get there.

People love praise. They love to receive accolades and pats on the back. It’s just a part of humanity. The people of the Church are no exception. 

There are many who serve the Lord because it puts them on a platform for people to see them. They are addicted to people coming up to them and saying, “Worship was awesome today!” or, “What a great message, pastor!” Of course, it’s not the reason that all serve, but unfortunately, with the way the modern church is– curated, broadcasted, and elevated– it’s easy for even the most well-intentioned of God’s people to fall into a dependence on approval from others in the Church.